nonconforming (TIGNC) people are the most criminalized for survivorship in the United States. Then if you look at the largest survey of TIGNC people in the country, with over 27,000 people surveyed, more than half reported they had experienced some form of IPV.” “Many people don’t understand that safety for some is coming at the price of the incarceration of many, many other people,” said Cosse. Social workers have a reason to be invested in systemic change. “Social work is an extension of the carceral state,” said Cosse. “We serve as an extension of criminalization. As an example, think of mandated reporting. In some states, it’s a criminal offense if you don’t protect your children from domestic violence. If I’m working with a survivor or if I’m working with a kid where there’s abuse happening, I am mandated to report it. What does that mean? And what does that action end up leading towards for the survivor or the child?” “We have to think of the ‘whatever to prison’ pipeline in any institution that we’re working in—that is part of abolition,” agrees Kelly. “I was a medical social worker in pediatric intensive care for a long time and noticed that the way the child welfare system functioned, they were working as an arm of the police. If I wasn’t careful, I could have been also. Instead, I chose to act as an advocate for children and families. You really have to think about the policies and protocols that are followed and why, and be skillful in advocating for changes to some of those policies and protocols along the way.” “Even if you are not an abolitionist, you probably don’t want all social problems to be handled by prisons. We know policing and incarceration are not the best solutions to social problems,” said Kelly. Even for those working within the prison system, the ideal is to find better solutions. “The reality is what we are trying to do is work ourselves out of a job,” said Schwartz. “I would love to see a day where the interventions we have implemented have taken root in the community in a way that ‘catches’ people when they fall—well before they end up in jail.” ◆
MACRO TO MICRO The impacts of social work in carceral spaces Social work for Brianna Suslovic, M.S.W. ’18, is about both the macro and the micro, the structural and the personal and changing systems for the benefit of many individuals. Currently a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, she describes the focus of her studies as “courts, prisons, policing, jails and the role of social work in all of those spaces.” Through her courses, she’s adding to her theoretical understanding of the relationship between policy changes and social change—the macro perspective—specifically, in regard to incarceration and decarceration. When she arrived at SSW, she recalled, “I had a very vague sense of how systems work, about policy and the constraints it places on social work, how it restricts clients’ access to housing, public defenders, mental health services. My favorite SSW classes were policy classes.” During her internships, Suslovic witnessed the micro effects of policy every day. “The folks I was seeing had either prior or current experience in the criminal justice system,” she recalled, and their lives were precarious. After getting her M.S.W., she was a forensic social worker in Brooklyn. “I kept seeing the same problems,” she said. “I recognized patterns: people being released from jail to go to a shelter, not getting there, ending up in the hospital. The goal has to be to address problems at a systemic level—to develop a coherent, comprehensive plan for assisting people in these situations.” More recently, Suslovic has taught courses on transformative justice at the University of Chicago; she also tutors at Cook County Jail for the high school equivalency exam. With members of the Chicago nonprofit Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, she’s developing courses for incarcerated students at Logan Women’s Prison. “As I’m teaching, I’m thinking about how to account for participants’ lived experience, finding parallels between the interpersonal and the structural. These women may have had a violent intimate partner or been isolated by a partner from friends and family, and now incarceration isolates them from those same sources of support,” Suslovic said. “It’s not a therapeutic setting, but I’m drawing on my clinical understanding of trauma and oppression. The teaching pulls on the same skills I’d use in group therapy.” “It’s generative, exciting,” she added, “to see students progress from not talking much in class to feeling capable, claiming a degree of ownership and authority over what they’re learning. So much of their experience is dehumanizing, it’s very moving when a student says, ‘I’m good at math,’ ‘I’m interested in history,’ or ‘I have skills I can put into practice.’” As moving, said Suslovic, are their motivations: getting their GED, for instance, to set an example for their kids. “I’m so impressed by how focused and invested the students are in their classes, how they’re prioritizing their professional, educational and personal goals, taking advantage of the chance to be in a classroom to revisit ideas and goals they’ve had to put aside.” As Suslovic’s students work toward a larger life through hard-won victories, she is right there with them. “It’s egalitarian,” said Suslovic, “There’s a lot that I’m learning, we’re teaching each other.”—Faye S. Wolfe
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